Because “stupid” is a pretty stupid term, I should probably take a minute here to describe what I mean. It’s not really a matter of raw IQ, and educational achievement only partially captures it. Stupid people are those who don’t understand what is happening around them and have no interest in actually finding out. Active ignorance would be another way of putting it, but “stupid” just sounds better. Despite being very well informed about electrons and such, a competent chemical engineer with a master’s degree could be very stupid indeed if he/she still believes that trickle down economics is a real thing.

you gotta feel for them: You know how unpleasant it is to feel like you don’t understand what everyone else is talking about, to have things explained to you twice, to feel like your opinions don’t matter and that you’ve been written off. And knowing that, it’s not far to imagine what a light in the darkness it must seem when someone who is just like you comes in and changes everything.

But see, not everybody was thinking that Hillary Clinton was an alien, that global warming was a Chinese hoax and that what America needed most of all was a plywood wall stretching from Texas to California. Only the stupid people were. And suddenly, in an instant, the most powerful man on earth was thinking just like them. With his clueless smirk and unstoppable rise, he turned people whose stupidity made them feel like nobody into people who felt like everybody.

That’s why he’ll never lose him. Because it was never about what he did or didn’t do. All that stuff is very confusing and the Stupid-American community isn’t interested in the details. They love him for who he is, which is one of them, and because he shows them every day that Stupid-Americans can reach the social mountaintop.

There’s this story we tell ourselves over and over and over again in this country: A new group of immigrants arrive or emerges and everyone else dumps on them. They face discrimination and miserable conditions but they persevere: They work hard, they organize, they assimilate to America and America assimilates to them, they grow, they contribute, they become proud of their new hyphenated selves and then one day, they break that last barrier. This is a story we can tell without words. This is a story we feel. This story is who we are. It’s in there so deep that you almost find yourself rooting for Stupid-Americans.

The thing I most worry about using anti-perfectionism arguments is that it begs a vision in the first place—perfectionism requires an idea of what's perfect. Projects suffer from a lack of real hypotheses. Fine, just build. But if you're cutting something important to others by calling it too perfect, can you define the goal (not just the ingredients)? We tend to justify these things by saying, we'll iterate. Much like perfectionism can always be criticized, iteration can theoretically always make a thing better. Iteration is not vision and strategy, it's nearly the reverse, it hedges vision and strategy. This is a slightly different point, but when we say we don't need this extra security or that UX performance, you're setting a ceiling on the people who are passionate about them. Those things really do have limits (no illusions!), but you're not just cutting corners, you're cutting specific corners. That's a company's culture. Being accused of perfectionism justifiably leads to upset that the company doesn't care about security or users. Yeah, maybe it's limited to this one project, but often not.

Perfection can be the enemy of the good. It's that it's not a particularly a helpful critique. To use the article’s concept, it’s the wrong scale. It might be helpful to an individual in a performance review, but it doesn’t say why X is unnecessary in this project or at this company. Little is added to the discussion until I describe X relative to the goal. Perfectionism is indeed good to avoid—it's basically defined as a bad thing by being "too". But the better conversation says how X falls short on certain measuring sticks. At the very least it actually engages X in the X discussion. Perfectionism is more of a critique of the person.

It takes effort to understand the person's idea enough to engage it, but more importantly it takes work that was supposed to (but might not) have gone into developing good projects or goals in the first place. Projects well-formed enough to create constraints for themselves.

I agree with the thesis of this article but I actually think the point would be better made if we switch from talking about optimizing to talking about satisficing[1]. Simply put, satisficing is searching for a solution that meets a particular threshold for acceptability, and then stopping. My personal high-level strategy for success is one of continual iterative satisficing. The iterative part means that once I have met an acceptability criterion, I am free to either move on to something else, or raise my bar for acceptability and search again. I never worry about whether a solution is optimal, though, only if it is good enough. I think that this is what many people are really doing when they say they are "optimizing", but using the term "optimzing" leads to confusion, because satisficing solutions are by definition non-optimal (except by luck), and some people (especially the young, in my experience) seem to feel compelled to actually optimize, leading to unnecessary perfectionism.

Perfectionism is sort of polarizing, and a lot of product manager / CEO types see it as the enemy. In certain contexts it might be, but in others “perfectionism” translates to “building the foundation flawlessly with the downstream dependencies in mind to minimize future tech debt.” Of course, a lot of managers prefer to pretend that tech debt doesn’t exist but that’s just because they don’t think they can pay it off in time before their team gets cut for not producing any value because they were so busy paying off tech debt.

kthejoker2 3 months ago | prev | next [–] Not sure you can talk about perfectionism without clarifying between "healthy" perfectionism and "unhealthy" perfectionism. Both exist, but often people are thinking of one or the other when discussing perfectionism, and it creates cognitive dissonance when two people thinking of the two different modes are singing perfectionism's praises or denouncing its practice.

looking at these comments, it seems perfectionism is ill-defined. it seems to be positive - perfectionism is not giving up, it is excellence, it is beyond mediocre. it also seems to be negative - it is going too far, it is avoiding/procrastinating, it is self-defeating. I wonder what the perfect definition would be?